Leeds Studies in English New Series XLVI 2015 Edited by Alaric Hall Reviews editor N. Kıvılcım Yavuz Leeds Studies in English <www.leeds.ac.uk/lse> School of English University of Leeds 2015 Leeds Studies in English <www.leeds.ac.uk/lse> Leeds Studies in English is an international, refereed journal based in the School of English, University of Leeds. Leeds Studies in English publishes articles on Old and Middle English literature, Old Icelandic language and literature, and the historical study of the English language. After a two-year embargo, past copies are made available, free access; they can be accessed via <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/lse>. Editorial Board: Catherine Batt, Chair Venetia Bridges Marta Cobb Alaric Hall, Editor Paul Hammond Oliver Pickering Helen Price Slavica Ranković N. Kıvılcım Yavuz Reviews Editor Notes for Contributors Contributors are requested to follow the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, 2nd edn (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008), available at <http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml>. Where possible, contributors are encouraged to include the digital object identifiers or, where a complete free access text is available, stable URLs of materials cited (see Style Guide §11.2.10.1). The language of publication is English and translations should normally be supplied for quotations in languages other than English. Each contributor will receive a free copy of the journal, and a PDF of their article for distribution. Please email all contributions to <[email protected]>. Reviews Copies of books for review should be sent to the Editor, Leeds Studies in English, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom. Contents Kinsmen Before Christ, Part II: The Anglo-Saxon Transmission 1 P. S. Langeslag University of Göttingen Saint as Seer: Structure and Style in Ælfric’s Life of St Cuthbert 19 Hiroshi Ogawa University of Tokyo (emeritus) The Virgin’s Kiss: Gender, Leprosy, and Romance in the Life of Saint 38 Frideswide Gary S. Fuller Brigham Young University The Terror of the Threshold: Liminality and the Fairies of Sir Orfeo 57 Piotr Spyra University of Łódź Þjalar-Jóns saga: A Translation and Introduction 73 Philip Lavender University of Copenhagen Reviews: Geraldine Barnes, The Bookish Riddarasögur: Writing Romance in 115 Late Mediaeval Iceland. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014 [Sheryl McDonald Werronen] Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’. 117 York: York Medieval Press, 2014 [Pelia Werth] Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani, 119 Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Brewer, 2015 [Benjamin Pohl] REVIEWS Geraldine Barnes, The Bookish Riddarasögur: Writing Romance in Late Mediaeval Iceland. The Viking Collection 21. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014. 211 pp. ISBN 978-87-7674-791-6. A new English-language monograph on the literary merits of medieval Icelandic romance is long overdue. It is not since Marianne Kalinke’s Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland (1990) that a substantial group of these texts has been discussed at length. Now, eighty years after the publication of Margaret Schlauch’s pioneering study Romance in Iceland (1934), this new book by Geraldine Barnes is a welcome addition to the still small — but growing — body of work on the genre. Promising to provide ‘readings of a group of riddarasögur which, in their debts to encyclopaedic writings and historical thought can […] be called “bookish” ’ (27–28), the monograph focuses on the romances written in medieval Iceland for Icelanders — the so-called indigenous riddarasögur, in contrast to those translated from other medieval European languages. The book’s introduction offers a brief historiography of these non-translated riddarasögur as a whole, and alerts the reader to the various types of learned material that the romance authors drew on in their composition, from the early encyclopaedic work of Isidore of Seville, to the Old Testament history written in Stjórn, to the widely disseminated Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais. Barnes’s study comprises five chapters, which discuss a group of riddarasögur, each text in its turn, from different thematic perspectives. The first of these, ‘Mapping and Measuring the World’, considers Nitida saga, Victors saga ok Blávus, and Vilhjálms saga sjóðs, and reveals ways in which these three romances draw on encyclopaedic material to demonstrate different understandings of world geography. The three medieval continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the four cardinal directions, feature as organising principles in these romances, but the way in which each manifests this is different. Barnes shows how Nitida saga takes the conventional medieval understanding of the three parts of the world and upends it into a ‘counter cosmography’ (p. 35) that makes the author’s northern homeland central, and likewise, how in Victors saga ok Blávus the three regions of the world represented by the romance’s three main characters — Victor (Europe), Blávus (Africa), and the maiden- king Fulgida (Asia) — are used in a text that ultimately comprises ‘a northern framework and a northern centre’, playing on the popular translatio studii et imperii topos (p. 45). In the chapter’s final section, the fastidious and chiefly geographical facts and measurements described throughout Vilhjálms saga sjóðs are shown to form an important part of its dual 115 Reviews framework of learned material and other riddarasögur; the text arguably assumes that its audience is ‘well positioned to appreciate [its] comic intertextuality’ (p. 52). Chapter 2, ‘The Boundaries of Knowledge’, takes Dínus saga drambláta, Kirialax saga, and Clári saga as its focus, showcasing discussion of the use and abuse of learning and knowledge in each case. Barnes shows how in Dínus saga drambláta a guide for the appropriate use of worldly knowledge and curiosity, rooted in patristic theology (p. 58), is ignored by the rival protagonists Dínus and Philotemia, who in their desire to outwit each other suffer the unfavourable consequences of what is depicted as unnatural curiosity and prideful vanity. Contrasting with this are then discussions of Kirialax saga, which takes a licit desire for knowledge and understanding of creation as the basis for the protagonist’s quest (pp. 66ff.), and Clári saga, which, while showing its characters to be learned yet curious, does not make this a feature of the romance (p. 75). Barnes reads Dínus saga drambláta and Clári saga (notable as one of the earliest riddarasögur) against each other in particular, and argues that they may ‘be considered in the context of the development of late medieval Icelandic romance as two ends of a broad compositional spectrum — from relatively straightforward exemplum in [Clári saga …], to the structural and ethical complexity’ on display in Dínus saga drambláta (p. 76). Chapter 3, ‘The March of History’, centres on Saulus saga ok Nikanors, Ectors saga, Vilhjálms saga sjóðs, and Adonias saga to show how both an awareness of and a concern for world history and written historical sources is evident in many Icelandic romances. Barnes begins by discussing how some riddarasögur use the motif of inscriptions, especially on walls, as an important means of transmitting history, as a notable feature among the romances that claim such ancient inscriptions as verifiable sources for the stories they tell. Similarly, we are shown in a brief section called ‘ekphrasis and memory’ how the legend of Troy also features prominently in many riddarasögur, as a part of this desire to acknowledge and build upon the past. In the individual discussions of the four romances featured in this chapter we see the role that Troy plays in each, as part of the ‘images of the past, as both word and picture, [which] serve as inspiration for the present’ authors and readers in medieval Iceland (p. 111). Chapter 4, ‘Defending Christendom’, looks at five romances: Jarlmanns saga ok Her- manns, Kirialax saga, Saulus saga ok Nikanors, Sigurðar saga þǫgla, and Rémundar saga keisarasonar. The chapter considers how images of crusading, the Christian knight, and conversion appear in many riddarasögur, and particular attention is paid to Rémundar saga keisarasonar, in which, Barnes shows, ‘a model of crusader knighthood is explicitly articulated’ (p. 145). We see how this longest of all riddarasögur draws on an array of learned material and other sources not only incidentally to enhance the story it tells (as some other romances seem to do), but to present a detailed picture of a Christian understanding of the world and the place of the questing crusader knight within it. Discussions of the other four texts in this chapter similarly illuminate the different ways in which each romance incorporates religious aspects into its setting, characters, and plot: we see how Jarlmanns saga ok Hermanns and Saulus saga ok Nikanors can be seen as a pair with similar themes, and how an episode in Kirialax saga draws on a ‘typical […] Christian-heathen engagement [from the genre of the] chanson de geste’ (p. 124). Chapter 5, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, focuses on six romances, three of which were not already discussed in earlier chapters: Dámusta saga, Bærings saga, and Sigrgarðs saga ok Valbrands. Barnes discusses the history of the negative understanding of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire in western European medieval romance due largely to the schism of 116 Reviews 1054, failed crusades, and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 (pp. 147–51); contrasting with this, we are then shown the largely positive understanding of the same people and places in medieval Scandinavian thought, through earlier Old Norse sagas and historical or encyclopaedic works (pp. 151–58). In the section ‘Constantinople in the riddarasögur’ Barnes draws on examples from a range of late medieval Icelandic romances to show how they ‘serve the common purpose of extolling the magnificence of Constantinople’ (p.